“Rainy Day” is now the most “liked” HD “true” video on Vimeo. The first one in that list is a timelapse made out of digital pictures rather than a real video. As far as I am concerned, when shooting video with the limitations and difficulties this encompasses, no one has made anything better than this video, after 9 months since it got released. I expect “Rainy Day” to surpass all videos in that list anyway, as it still gets over 200 page views per day…

To me, this is the benchmark to beat.

Vegetation shots around the quiet ‘Palace of Fine Arts’ in San Francisco. My JBQ poses in the opening shot of the video. I experimented a bit with HV20’s DOF. HD version here.

Details from one of the finest bridges on Earth, the Golden Gate Bridge. HD version here.

Panasonic thought it was April and NAB time today, and so they had a bunch of press releases. Among them was their new high-end prosumer/indie camera, the HMC150. This is a pretty nifty camera, an upgrade over the HVX-200, which was the indie filmmaker’s darling so far. This camera uses 3CCD 1/3″, which creates as much background blur as the HV20. Not very much that is. On the other hand, it records full HD at 30p and 24p, and also native 720p and 1080/60i. It’s expected to cost $6000.

The most interesting point here is that Panasonic goes AVCHD and the tapes are a thing of the past. I did fully expect that all prosumer cameras will be AVCHD for this next generation. I now expect Sony’s and Canon’s announcements to also be AVCHD-based.

The AG-HMC150 sounds sweet with its 3.5″ LCD screen, but two things really bug me to the point that I want to throw this camera to the head of its product manager:

1. No internal (swappable?) hard drive in addition to its SDHC card slot. This makes the camera even more expensive, and honestly, not as convenient as Panasonic would like us to think it is. Panasonic is a big flash manufacturer, so they want us to buy, buy, buy SD cards. Freaking douche bags.

2. According to the press release, it uses 13 mbps for 1080/60i (1440×1080). This is not enough. We’ve seen that res/bitrate on many other cameras and quality was not even better than the HV20 which is a $700 camera nowadays. Panasonic should give at least 18 mbps to 1080/60i and 24 mbps (full AVCHD spec) to 1080/24p/30p (1920×1080).

And 1080/60p would have been nice too, at around 40 mbps (even if they had to go over the AVCHD spec). But I understand that it might be a bit early for 1080/60p (the next big version of Blu-ray will support that, but that’d be in years from now).

But honestly, these two points above, are really stinky. I can’t wait to see what Canon has to offer for their next-gen prosumer line. I have $3000 to spend.

Rico Bergholdt Hansen re-posted his amazing shots on Vimeo as a new video after some of my suggestions. HD version here.

Gray cards allow you to set the right white balance, while at the same time they help the camera guess the right exposure, shutter speed, aperture and gain. Doing color correction in-camera with a gray card creates no artifacts & it’s more accurate that when using digital color correction on post. More information here.

While gray cards are mostly used indoors (very good to calibrate exposure on low light among other gains), you can certainly use them outdoors too if the light conditions are weird (e.g. snowy surroundings, shooting under shadowy trees, cloudy days). Buy an “18% percent” gray card for $4. The smaller ones (more convenient to carry, but not as good for outdoors) cost $2. I made a video to show off the capability.

Here’s how you use them:
1. Place the camera at the place you will be shooting from.
2. Place the gray card vertically (without an incline, facing at the lens) on the spot you will be shooting at. If outdoors, place it as far as you can, as long as it still fills the frame when you zooming-in to it.
3. Put the camera into the non-automatic mode, and select the “Custom white balance” setting. All Canon camcorders allow for custom white balance (even the cheapest ones), but most of the cheaper non-Canon cameras don’t have this feature. If that’s the case, then you can’t use a Gray card, you need a camcorder that’s more serious than a toy (sorry, I had to pick at JVC).
4. Zoom-in all the way to the gray card to fill the frame (nothing else should be shown in the LCD screen or viewfinder but a dark gray color). At that point, set the custom white balance (according to your camera’s manual).

That’s it, shoot using that setting and enjoy true whites that are not yellows or reds. If the lighting conditions change (e.g. you moved from a very shadowy tree to a less shadowy place, or if the sun changed position a lot, or if you moved to another room), you will have to redo the four steps above.

Flower macro shots using close-up lenses (Tiffen CU+4) on the HV20, slow motion and extreme color grading. Download the 720p MP4 file or view the HD version online here.

Took 7:15′ hours to render just these 4′:10″ minutes of video, so you better watch.

You don’t want to carry around tripods or even a monopod? This is a solution that it’s almost as good as a monopod in stabilization performance, it fits in your pocket, and costs just $5. Some manual assembly is required.